Biduginbul man Wes Marne (left) who spoke to about 60 people at a Sorry Day event at University of Western Sydney.
Photograph: Sally Tsoutas/University of Western Sydney

Survivors of the stolen generation have marked National Sorry Day at events around Australia, calling the high rates of Indigenous children being removed from their families a continuing injustice.

Larrakia man John Browne, 66, organised an event in Adelaide on Tuesday that 3,000 people were expected to attend. “This is a reminder of the experiences we’ve been through and that we’re still here,” he told Guardian Australia.

Browne’s mother was six years old when she was placed on a cattle station in the Northern Territory. She was repeatedly raped, beaten and “treated like a slave” throughout her teenage years. At 11, Browne was taken from his mother under the assimilation policy and sent to live with a foster family in Adelaide.

“You lose your culture, your tradition and your engagement with your family. You never see them growing up. So when you go back they see you as a stranger, you’re not accepted as one of them.”

Browne said jails in Adelaide were full of stolen generation survivors. “They have been traumatised by their experience and haven’t been able to get their lives back.”

“It’s a sad day, but it’s a happy day. We’re celebrating our success that we’ve survived the stolen generation and government policies.”

The national advocacy network Grandmothers Against Removals convened in Perth to lead a protest “against continuing stolen generations” and “show solidarity with communities facing closure”.

In a group statement they wrote they were “appalled that WA premier Colin Barnett is using ‘child protection’ as an excuse to forcibly remove entire communities from their lands, recycling the same lies about child abuse used to justify the NT intervention.

“These forced closures will be systematic child abuse on a massive scale, putting families into destitution, more kids into foster care, more adults into prison.”

Writing for Guardian Australia, a senior researcher at UTS, Padraic Gibson, likened current child protection operations in Australia to a “new stolen generation”. Gibson investigated the impact of forced child removal on Aboriginal families in the Northern Territory and saw a number of families “having their children removed essentially because they are Aboriginal”.

In other cases support and more resources for the extended family to play a caring role was needed, “rather than forced removal from kin and culture that just continues the cycle of oppression and hopelessness”, he wrote.

National Sorry Day began with the 1997 release of the Bringing Them Home report, which documented the gross violations of human rights endured by Indigenous Australian families and communities and in particular the forcible removal of children from their families.

A 2015 scorecard report by the National Sorry Day committee found that Bringing Them Home’s set of 54 recommendations “remains as relevant today as it was in 1997” and noted their work had been impeded due to the fact that the current government “was not interested in engaging”.

Of particular concern were that “only partial steps have been taken toward reparation” and “the failure to implement human rights-based frameworks of the protection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children based on the principle of self-determination”.

A children’s book examining the stolen generation, written by Lisa Miranda Sarzin and illustrated by Lauren Briggs, was also launched. Sporting stars Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin lent their support to the book, called Stories For Simon, with Goodes saying it “not only teaches children but the parents as well”.

Biduginbul man Wes Marne, 93, spoke to about 60 people at a Sorry Day event at University of Western Sydney. He was moved onto Deadbird mission, Inverell in northern New South Wales when he was 10 years old and works with victims of the stolen generation.

Marne said he was in Canberra and cried when the then prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the stolen generation in 2008. “It was something I had been waiting for for many, many years,” he said.

Sorry Day was “just a start to reconciliation, which is another thing we must have”, said Marne. “I don’t want them to say they were sorry and forget about it five minutes after.”